The present invention relates to techniques for creating and processing a document with use of a word processor or personal computer for its display and print and more particularly, to a technique for processing a document which uses information that frequently appears in the document as shared information.
For the purpose of efficiently sharing and re-using document information, a recent active move is to use such a document language as a standard generalized markup language (SGML) or XML to obtain and utilize a document.
Since a document prepared in a structured document language can be prepared by dividing the document into its structural elements as document parts for editing and describing links to the respective parts, it is easy for the document parts to be shared with another document or to re-use another document on every part basis.
When it is desired to display or print the link-described document having such links to the parts described therein, the document converted to a document having the contents of the document parts of the other link-destination document embedded in the locations, and then displayed or printed.
To this end, a conventional editor for editing such a document provides a means for designating a document part as a part of the other document to describe a link to the document in the editing document.
When such a document editor is used, it can facilitate such an operation that a figure, which was prepared in a functional specification as another document, can be re-used, for example, during editing of a design document.
Further, when a re-used part was edited, its edited result can be reflected throughout the entire document having the shared part. As a result, consistency management can be facilitated.
JP-A-8-44718 (Fuji Xerox Ltd.) discloses a method that, when a figure or table is shared among a plurality of documents, its shared relationships are managed so that, even the shared constituent element is edited in the sharing original document, its edited result can be correctly reflected even on the other shared documents (figure or table), thus maintaining a consistency of the shared information.
In addition, even in a document system for performing edition management, the above method can keep the shared information consistency. Thus, when it is desired to reduce the number of versions, it becomes possible to judge whether a constituent element or elements are shared among a plurality of versions, thus realizing such a management as to prevent an inconsistency in the shared relationships.
Constituent elements of documents which are effective when the elements are shared include, in addition to such a figure or table as mentioned in connection with JP-A-8-44718, a character string which are used in many documents.
For example, at the time of preparing a document, it is very often for a document writer to consistently use the same character string as in a plurality of documents or in one document. More specifically, when it is desired to prepare specifications in a product development project, it is required to use common module names, unique abbreviations and coinages which constitute the project.
In reality, however, it is often required to modify such words to more appropriate ones as the project goes on. In such a case, it has been conventionally inevitably required to manually modify all the documents at the modified time point.
When such documents are written as shared by a plurality of writers, it becomes further difficult to obtain a word consistency throughout the documents and thus it inevitably involves an enormous amount of labor of finally proof-reading the documents.
Further, person's names or belonging departments are frequently appear in a plurality of documents regardless of the document types. For this reason, when a belonging department was modified, it is also required to modify many associated documents.
Furthermore, when a document is prepared, it is often not to prepare the document newly but to copy the same type of document as a template and to edit the contents thereof. Thus, even when it is required to change the old department to the new one, it is often to erroneously leave some of the old departments as they are without being modified to the new ones.
When such modification information is treated as a document part to be shared among a plurality of documents, the information consistency can be automatically realized. And even when the information is corrected, its corrected contents can be reflected on all the documents. As a result, highly efficient document preparation and editing can be carried out.
However, when such shared information is edited in the conventional system for its sharing, this involves problems which follow.
FIG. 5 shows an example of a plurality of documents which contain a document part or parts as a part or parts of the other documents with use of a known document editor.
For example, when a FIG. 504 (which is called share originator information), which forms one of constituent elements of a document A 501, is designated to describe its link to a document B 502, this causes appearance of contents of the document part (FIG. 504) of a link destination in the document B 502 (as a figure 505).
Next, when it is desired to share the same FIG. 504 even in a document D 506, a document containing the share originator information, that is, the document A 501 is searched to perform similar share designation to the above.
When information is shared in such a large unit as the figure and the number of sharing units as document parts is not so large as in the example of FIG. 5, the conventional system may be applicable. However, when such document parts such as terms, names and belonging departments appear frequently, this share designating operation becomes highly troublesome.
That is, when many pieces of information are to be shared in such a small unit, it becomes difficult in the share designation to search the other documents containing the share originator information. Meanwhile, it is often that an identical type of shared information is simultaneously modified as when many terms are modified or a plurality of persons changes their belonging departments at a time in a project. In this case, the prior art system is required to search and modify the other documents containing the share originator information, which makes the modifying operation complex.
Meanwhile, information on person's name or belonging department is associated with each other, and thus when a person is determined, its name, belonging department, extension telephone number ought to be automatically determined. However, when the prior art system is employed to edit the document to share information associated with the person, its name, belonging department and extension telephone number are shared respectively independently. For this reason, modification of, e.g., name cannot follow automatic modification of the belonging department and extension telephone number associated with the name and require individual editing of the shared information. As a result, its editing operation becomes highly complicated.
For the purpose of controlling such related information, a database management-system is employed. This system however has a problem that, since schema design for determining a data structure is difficult in database, the system cannot be easily applied to document preparation. Another problem is that, once the data structure is determined, it becomes hard to modify the structure.
Further, when the shared information was modified, there are considered two cases where it is desired to reflect the modification on all documents having the shared part and the other, it is desired not to reflect the modification on past documents already edited.
For example, in the case of a term used in a project, it is necessary to reflect the term modification even on the documents already edited, but with respect to reporter's name and belonging department described in a report submitted in the past, the information at the time of the submission must remain.
The prior art system has a problem that the management of consistency between the above two cases cannot be realized since the part modification is inevitably reflected on all the documents having the shared part.
The prior art system also has another problem that, when it is desired to modify shared information and to reflect the information modification on documents having the shared information, the correlation between the document and shared information link varies depending on the modification contents of the shared information, resulting in a wrong reflection thereof.